" Big fat con: If you opt to charge your gold subscription with a credit card, you are forced to continue doing so every year. If you don't, they will suspend your account and you can't go online or access your profile. The only way to get out of it is to pay the subscription fee again, you can't just go back to a silver account. "
They don't force you, they auto charge you unless you cancel. It would be illegal to ban your account for not wanting to pay for another year. "
I'll just elaborate on this, since I downgraded my Gold account a few months ago. It used to be a pain to cancel, you had to actually call Microsoft to do it, but these days you can just cancel auto renewals through xbox.com. Oh, and if by chance they can't charge your credit card, you'll be downgraded to Silver.
Tali on first playthrough, Miranda on second. I would've chosen Jack on the third but... she's really fucking scary! I'd be worried about her trying to bite off The General at some point.
What about Mafia? To this day, I still consider it one of the finest games ever released on the PC. And personally I would put in the entire Monkey Island Series... No, all the old LucasArts Adventure games. Also, Dreamfall but not the original The Longest Journey? Shame on you. Morrowind.
And I, like many others could keep going forever, but I'll stop here :)
I've played on and off since release, and there are still days where I get my ass handed to me on a silver platter, and others where I somehow manage to kill everything in sight. It depends not just on the server, but also time of day, though I'm consistently somewhere in the middle when the game ends. My advice is just keep playing, you'll get better. The classes are pretty straight forward. You could always choose a Heavy and do the spray n' pray approach, or even better, go Medic and heal the Heavy. It doesn't really matter as long as you're enjoying yourself.
Nope, no MMOs for me anymore. I was once addicted to Anarchy Online, where I could easily play for up to 16 hours a day, and I knew all the various buff items and spells plus their buff amount. Played it for about a year, logged in one day and found that I had completely lost interest in it. Since then I've tried EVE Online, Galaxies, EQ, EQ2, AOC, COH/COV, Football Manager Live, Guild Wars, WoW and many others, but no, they do absolutely nothing for me anymore. Well, almost nothing. I did still manage to get a Death Knight from 55 to 80 in a weekend... and then I canceled my subscription.
Back in ’98 when I was a wee boy of 15 years, I bought my usual local gaming mag. In it, there was usually a CD-ROM with a ton of demos, and occasionally a free game. This time, the free game was called Sub Culture.
Released in 1997 by Criterion Games (you can probably guess how successful it was when you could get it for free 1 year later), Sub Culture was a 3rd person Action/Adventure game. You take the role of a tiny humanoid submarine pilot, the only survivor of a discarded can of soup destroying your home city, and your objective is basically to survive and prosper. To do this, you could take on mining or salvage missions, trying to recover bottle caps, cigarette butts, pearls and various other commodities that could be sold in the cities. This was where one of the game’s best mechanics came into play. Since just about any valuable item was almost as big as your sub, you couldn’t exactly put them into your hold, so you were equipped with either a magnet or a grappling hook, depending on what you were salvaging. As soon as the magnet hooked on something, it would weigh down your sub depending on its weight, which made controlling much more difficult. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem except that between you and the nearest city, there were almost always a bunch of enemies which would range from giant fish to pirates that want you dead.
Now, fighting without dragging anything behind you could be a bit challenging but when you were carrying a bottle cap that was as heavier than your sub, things could get… interesting. This game had physics, so anything you carried would have an effect on your sub. You would always move slower, and if you stopped, you would slowly sink. Stop too fast and the item would shoot forward, dragging you with it. This could make combat tricky, since you would constantly have to battle not just enemies, but also a heavy haul. You could of course just drop it and come back for it later, but occasionally you would be above a deep trench, and having to go all the way down for it again was not really an option (in the deepest trench, reaching the bottom could take a couple of minutes).
Once you got tired of hauling things, you could take on missions for either of the two warring nations, the Bohines and Procheas. The missions consisted of fighting off pirates, navigating minefields, dropping depth charges and destroying a giant walker. Eventually they decide that peace is the only option if they want to get rid of the pirates, and they send you in to destroy the pirate city and go out in a final blaze of glory.
Honestly, the story isn’t what made this game great. It was the atmosphere and gameplay. There was a simple market economy, so hauling that bottle cap over to a distant city could net you a bigger profit, than if you just sold it at the nearest port. You could equip your sub with everything from depth charges to lightning guns, shields, strobe lights and an escape pod.
The lights weren’t just for show either. You know how in most games, night means ‘slighter darker than day’, right? Now, it was pretty much the same here except for when you went exploring in one of the trenches or caves. It wouldn’t get dark, it would get black. You couldn’t see anything without lights, which made for some scary moments when a hideous angler fish-like monster would attack you. The graphics were, for the time, really good. You would see sea turtles swimming around, minding their own business, colorful fish and other subs going about their daily routine. Very cool game and I highly recommend it.
If you find it and try to run it in Vista or Win7, you’ll probably run into some problems, but you should be able to find a fix here
Oh, and as a side note, I remember playing this on my Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo 1 card (the first 3dfx card ever, if my history is correct). It was a pass-through card with no 2d support, so you needed a 2d card, and had to bridge the two cards with a cable. Anyway, it had a mechanical relay on it that would actually make the card produce a fairly loud ‘click’ when it was accessed. That was an extremely scary sound the first couple of weeks I had the card, since no one really expects their computer to sound like that :)
Well, I've only been playing for 2 days, but here's what I've learned so far:
-ALWAYS SPOT! It is incredibly helpful. If you're a beginner, getting used to doing this should be easy. -Don't just rush blindly forwards, it will get you killed. Think, then move. -Use cover. If you don't, you die. -Stick with your squad. In almost all the games I've been in, I see people all over the place, doing their own thing (I may have done this myself the first couple of hours :-). Strength in numbers. -Communicate with your team. If an attack is well coordinated, a round can be over in a matter of a few minutes. -Don't just blindly spawn next to a squad mate. If he's under fire, there's a good chance you'll be caught in the crossfire when you spawn. -If you're new, you will probably die a lot until you get used to the mechanics of the game and level up a bit. Just fight through it, it will get better. Of course, if you're like me, you'll still die a lot, but at least you get plenty of points :-)
Started off as Soldier when the game was released, but play pretty much exclusively as a Scout these days. Running around, annoying the opposition is really satisfying. I wanted to get better with the Spy, but I just can't get get used to him.
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